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Both the left and the conservative right viewed the
universal suffrage and its concomitant development of parliamentary democracy
with almost equal scepticism, albeit in two opposite directions, when growing
political democracy became the ground reality in Western Europe in the late
nineteenth century capitalism. Marx, in his account of 1848-50 working class
upheavals in France, argued that the logic of universal suffrage would lead political
to social emancipation of the workers ultimately through the social ownership of
all the means of production. On the contrary, in the House of Commons debates
of 1866-67 conservative politicians like Cecil argued passionately against the
impending electoral reforms that would empower the workers to vote. In their
eyes, democracy would inevitably lead to socialism. But capitalism in its
heydays after its more than long two hundred years of history could accommodate
universal suffrage when the reform act of 1867 which empowered electorally a
significant section of the British working class, was passed in Britain.
Whether the view of the revolutionary left to consider the universal suffrage for
working class as the way for unchaining class struggle or the view of the
parliamentary left to consider it as the opportunity of achieving a commanding
economic position for the working class is correct, is a different debate
altogether. But the historic specificity made it imperative for capitalism in
reconciling with working class right and accommodating them in a democratic set
up to avert the transformation of working class from ‘class in itself’ to
‘class for itself’. The contradiction between the capitalist economy of profit
and accumulation for its own continuous reproduction and the rights of the
working class was so inherent within the parliamentary democracy that it
strives to shed its democratic essence in favour of authoritarian or fascist
rule in the time of crisis arisen from the contradiction within the capitalism

The contradiction of capitalism arise, as Marx
expressed it, ‘from the fact that capital and its self-expansion appear as the
starting point, as the motive and aim of production; that production is merely
production for capital, not vice versa, the means of production mere means for
an ever expanding system of the life process for the benefit of the society of
producers. The characterization holds good for fascism, but there is this
difference, conflicts between the different branches of capital are largely
suppressed in the interests of capital as a whole, and heavy risks are pooled
through the instrumentality of state.’ (Facsism, sweezy 2002 : 342). Actually
the contradiction of capitalism consists in its inability to utilise the means
of production ‘for ever expanding system of the life process for the benefit of
the society or producers’. (ibid, 343). The fascist movement grows with the
sharpening of this contradiction as the economic crisis breaks out.

Karl Marx dwelt on the dual nature of labour under
capitalism. On the one hand, argues Marx, labour is abstract labour, involved
in producing commodities for the market, objectified as value, expressed in the
exchange of commodities for money, from which capital extracts profit. On the
other hand, labour is also involved in the production of use value, concrete
labour, both individual and social. Under capitalism, the two forms of labour
are, he argued, in constant tension with each other: creative, purposeful
activity is subordinated to labour disciplined for the maximization of profit.
Potentially, this tension is one of self-determining activity versus alienated
labour (Elson 1979). In this tension lie a source of agency and the transformative
potential of labour (Transformative resistance – The role of labour and Trade
Unions in Alternative to Privatisation.- Hilary Wainwright : 82)

Neo-liberalism and democracy

Triggered by the threat of privatization in this
neo-liberal phase of capitalism, the working class struggle for power which
rests on the enhancement of democratic control over the labour process, and the
purpose of labour, including accessibility to public service and utilities is a
possible outcome. So in this phase, working class struggle must underpin the
move from a struggle simply to defend workers’ livelihood to a struggle over a
service that should be for the benefit of all.

The representative democracy in the face of the
pressures from mobile global capital is in crisis. In India, unlike the west
the parliamentary democracy was adopted at a time just after the Independence
when India’s per capita income was very low and the capitalist development was
very weak in comparison to that of western countries. The extent of parliamentary
democracy that could be adopted by the political class in a premature and
dependent capitalist country like India was perhaps due to the accommodative
stream of freedom struggle that strived to address Indian cultural diversity,
and the democracy deficit in the bourgeois parliamentary sense was due to the
accommodation of obscurantist, casteist and communal stream of freedom struggle
by the Indian ruling class at the time of independence. The achievement of
independence with truncated democracy was in the interest of British
imperialists. But Indian democracy and the pluralism not only survived but also
thrived within the framework of uneven capitalist development despite
occasional disruption. But at this juncture of political change and economic crisis,
the disruption of parliamentary democracy which is on the verge of collapse
leaving space for fascist forces to reign in is all-pervasive.

The weakening of democracy is the result of political
change caused by the gradual dismantling and loss of efficacy of institutional
structures that hitherto ensured the involvement of the union of organised
labour. Though the organised labour in India is less than 10 percent of the
total workforce, but this economically active labour has been the backbone of
the welfare state that has to embrace a broader section of society through its welfare
measures within the ambit of a nationalized capitalistic development policy.

Neo-liberalism and the labour

But through the neo-liberal policy of privatization
and contractualisation from the eighties, the majority of the economically
active population is becoming either unemployed, their work is casualised, or
they are hired through labour brokers. The majority of the rural population who
were hitherto engaged in agricultural activity has been transformed into
unorganised labour-force in service sector, and the majority of them have
become migrant workers. The wage-earners by selling their labour power are
brought under the real subsumption of capital. The agricultural labourer is
getting gradually transformed into the sellers of their labour-power for making
profit for the capital in agri-businesses. Moreover, an 8 percent growth rate
in India since 1991 has created no absolute increase in manufacturing jobs. As
Patnaik pointed out, “corporate industry not only generates little additional
employment; but in addition it uses its monopoly to carry out primitive
accumulation of capital (or more generally what I would call accumulation
through encroachment): by demanding concession from the state exchequer; by
imposing ‘conditionalities’ on the state government to the detriment of the
people, including dispossession from their land and displacement from their
habitat; and by engaging in land speculation.” (Vijay Prasad: 2015, page 249,).
The welfare state was a struggle within capitalism for a transfer of value led
by the workers themselves for whom the insufficiency and insecurity of wage is
a threat to survival and reproduction (Wayener 1986: 56-84). The globalization
and restructuring of the state has set into cumulative causative process that
brings down the price of labour even below its real cost for super profit.
(Working Class and Insecurity Hypothesis – Anuradha Kalhan)

The philosophy of managerial control system of labour process
is separation of intellectual work from the work of execution. There is no
spread of knowledge or skill; there is polarisation of knowledge and skill. A
few have it and the vast numbers are deprived of it. Such a separation of
intellectual work from the work of execution is indeed a technical condition
best adapted to a hierarchical organisation, best adapted to the control of
both the hand and the brain of worker, best adapted to profitability, best
adapted to everything but the needs of the people. In the time of capitalist
crisis, much emphasis is given to increase the intensity of labour by mechanisation,
lowering wages or by increasing labour-time. According to official statistics, between
1991 and 2004 employment fell in the organised public sector, and the organised
private sector hardly compensated for this. The economic policy to achieve
growth is driven by a mechanism by which growing inequality drives growth, and
growth fuels further inequality. To delineate this predatory growth, Amith Bhaduri
wrote, “not only is there little growth in the purchasing power of the poor,
but the reduction in welfare expenditures by the state stunts the growth in
demand for necessities.” So, to achieve this target of growth, the legal and
institutional structures those have been historically developed to protect
certain rights of the labour and its concomitant societal welfare need to be
dismantled.

Caste, cultural cleavages and labour

Under
capitalism, social reproduction refers to the reproduction of the capital –
wage labour relationship, and thereby, the construction of labour power as
commodity. However, there are three peculiarities of labour, first, the
commodity labour power is inseparable from the human being, as Marx said that
labour power is the capacity of a living person to labour, which in turn,
depends on labour’s productive consumption. Second, there is a historical,
social and cultural basis of determining the value of labour power. It would
differ in time and place. Third, of all the commodities produced in a
capitalist society, labour is the only one that cannot be produced
capitalistically based on wage labour and the extraction of surplus value. It
is produced outside the ambit of the market in the household and family, which
may be penetrated, by the market and state but lies outside it.

But the question is how the Indian caste system which
has an Indian historical specificity is getting accommodated in the uneven
developmental framework of global capitalism. One of the dominant views of the
social scientists is that Indian Society is hierarchical but, at the same time,
segmented. The logic of hierarchy and of segmentation is provided by one and
the same ideology and a deeply ingrained institutional structure supporting
that ideology, namely, the caste system. ( Amiya Kumar Bagchi 2002 : 141). But
this is not something to say that Indian society is sui generis and the
capitalistic development which is characteristically uneven cannot accommodate
the institution of caste in the framework of extracting relative surplus value
as profit from the Indian hierarchical but segmented labour force. Furthermore,
both the capitalist domination and hegemony or coercion and consent are more
glaringly visible in the post-colonial countries than the western Europe, the
birth place of capitalism, but this also does not mean that the hegemony of the
Bourgeoisie is the only characteristic trait of capitalism in the western
countries. This becomes apparent when Amiya Kumar Bagchi writes in his book
“Capital and labour redefined: India and the third world”

“…. But Marx and Engels certainly did not believe in
mind-body dualism, or in the thesis that workers, as soon as they become
sellers of labour power, miraculously shed all their other identities except in
relation to their fellow-workers, and the capitalist control they have to
confront daily. In his astonishingly precocious book on the working class,
Engels fully recognized the cultural identity of particular groups of workers
-- the Irish as against the English, for example – and similar references recur
in their works and correspondence in later years also.” (Dualism and Dialectics
2002: 208-09)

From the colonial period to the present neo-liberal
phase, the capital is utilising the diverse socio-cultural specificities in two
different ways – one, cultural affiliation to a certain community gives the
labourer a support system to his/her living condition that allows the capitalist
to squeeze more surplus value than the completely alienated labourer bereft of
such cultural community affiliation. Second, the primordial values of the
cultural specificities are used to divide the working class, and this is the
sphere where the objective of the obscurantist forces and the capitalists
coincide.

This phenomenon is visible both within the manual
labourers as well as new employees in the service sector. One of the reason of
the IT industry’s success is that it has been able to tap the existing cultural
capital of the urban middle classes (which consist primarily of high and middle
classes) – including their educational attainment, knowledge of English, and
some degree of westernized social orientation and habitus. The IT workforce is
drawn mainly from this section of society, and by providing new and lucrative
employment opportunities it is in turn contributing to the reproduction and
consolidation of middle class/upper caste domination. The middle class is
certainly expanding in size and diversity, and the IT industry has been an
important force behind this process by pulling at least some people from non-dominant social group into the
middle class. Yet, in the final analysis, the industry cannot be said to have
contributed to overcoming the social and economic division that continue to
characterize Indian Society. (Employment, Exclusion And ‘Merit’ in the Indian
IT industry – Carol Upadhya ( Esssays
from EPW edited by Satish Deshpande)

Migrant Workers : Colonial Experience

Industrial capitalism and the colonisation ofAsia,
Africa, the Caribbean and other parts of world by the British Empire triggered
a massive mobilisation of marginalised agrarian communities from the Indian
subcontinent, to serve as labour both within and in overseas colonies. Between
1834 and 1937, over 30 million migrants from India, 98 percent of them as
labourers, are estimated to have gone to overseas British colonies like Burma,
Ceylon, British Malay, Mauritius, Fiji, the Caribbean and East Asia. The first
major colonial capital investment was in Indian plantation sector. In Assam Tea
plantation, the planters preferred the migrant workers from Bengal and other
adjoining regions to the local tribal workers who were engaged for clearing the
jungle. This preference was primarily based on the observation of the planters
that the local tribal workers were culturally against confinement and coercion
that was principal aspect of getting workers allegiance and servitude to
capital. Since Assam was a wholly strange place for a migrant labourer who came
from great distances to work on the plantation, he was placed in a relation of
complete dependency vis-à-vis the manager. The manager occupied a special
position in almost every aspect of garden life. He was the provider of
accommodation, subsidised rice and space for recreational activities to the
labourers, and also acted as arbitrator of their internal feuds.

Rana P. Behal in his book ‘One hundred years of
servitude – Political economy of tea plantation in colonial Assam’ wrote, “The
structure of the planter’s power hierarchy based on coercion and authority,
aided and abetted by the colonial state, which was to dominate production
relations in the Assam tea plantation for long, evolved in the 1860s with the
introduction of the indenture system at the height of the speculative boom of
the ‘tea mania’ years. Over the next couple of decades this power structure
developed and operated at two levels. At the top level, the tea companies, with
their headquarters in Britain and managing agents in Calcutta, instituted a
centralized authority in the form of an apex body in 1881, the Indian Tea
Association. ……………. At the ground level, these strategies and policies were
enforced through a hierarchical power structure centered around the managerial
authority of European planters and their assistants.” This power structure developed
on the premise of capital-labour relation has been undergoing certain
modifications during late and post colonial period to ensure super profit for
the plantation capital.

Fascism and new labour

Every capitalist nation, in the period of imperialism,
carries within it the seeds of fascism. The question naturally arises whether
it is inevitable that these seeds should take root and grow to maturity.
Fascism arises out of a situation in which the structure of capitalism has been
severely injured and yet not overthrown. The approximate class equilibrium
which ensues at once intensifies the underlying difficulties of capitalist
production and emasculates the state power. Under these conditions the fascist
movement grows to formidable proportions, and when a new economic crisis breaks
out, as it is bound to do, the capitalist class embraces fascism as the only
way out of its otherwise insoluble problems.

Social scientists see society deeply divided into
three knowledge based classes – the symbolic analyst who creates and
manipulates knowledge, a service class to support them and a large number of
people who have no economic role at all. There is a tendency like never before
to polarise the working class.

From the Indian perspective, the huge unorganised and
un-unionised labour-force along with pauperised and unemployed reserve army of
labour are amenable to fall in the trap of fascist movement which addresses the
primordial and narrow traits of cultural specificities and exclusionary
tendencies. In the absence of an alternative strategy to address the material
interest as well as the cultural contents which are particular in form but
universal in essence, the fascist ideology and the political force will have
enough space to extend their sphere of influence to reign in the state power.
This alternative programme for democracy must include the democratic control
over the labour process and the purpose of labour, including accessibility to
public service and utilities. To achieve this end, working class struggle must
underpin not only the wage struggle simply to defend workers’ livelihood but
also the struggle over a service that should be for the benefit of all. The
workers struggle must also address the cultural specificities that support the
existence of the labourer as human being and the labourer’s livelihood as a
member of a particular community.